Halo Dev Tracker

It's a manual grant that someone on the team has to do. I think there's a chance they will do one or two grants over the holiday break (I'm hearing maybe a first grant tomorrow, maybe another next Friday, etc.) but offiically, at a minimum, players can expect to get the nameplate post Jan. 1 when folks are back at work from the break.

It's included but was inadvertantly left out of the initial messaging.

If you have MCC on Xbox then you have more games than just Reach which means there are more options included (for both Campaign and MP maps). This Message was specifically for PC, which currently only has Reach.

In general, behavior that is intended to bypass game systems, rules, and/or creates a negative experience for other unwilling players is not behavior we condone in the game. Collaborating to trade kills is much harder to track and isn't something we're pursuing as aggressively as the rampant AFK XP farming epidemic we've seen. Often times it's a mutually agreed upon thing with no real 'victims.' In many cases, the bannable part of 'sword-lining' comes when someone declines to opt-in and then is barraged with threats, insults and offensive language (voice and/or text) and/or repeatedly betrayed and griefed, which then violates the code of conduct.

We have automatic tools that are detecting this behavior. Regardless of whether it's the in-game theater or GameDVR it's just not super practical for people to dig through and watch hundreds/thousands of clips for video evidence. The team is on this though and hopefully with the latest round of bans and the looming threat of more serious enforcement actions - along with DoubleXP for legit players - we'll see this issue die down.

People who get banned always say that. Thus far every single person who has reached out to question a ban has in fact been shown to have deserved it. The criteria was actually pretty forgiving just to be extra careful false-positives weren't an issue.

It's a pretty hard problem to solve given the underlying campaign networking architecture is very old. Re-doing all of that is a signficant undertaking (much more complex that the work that was done for MP, dedicated server support for Firefight, etc.). Not sure there's _nothing_ the team can do, they've heard the feedback and would like to find opportunities to improve, but real talk there's no magic solution and anything would be a massive reworking of the entire netcode for a 9 year old game.

Same here and this is legacy code from 2010. It became much more egregious and noticeable on M+KB I think. Our internal pro team brought this to light a few weeks back and the community at large seems to have just picked up on this earlier this week - just in time for this patch to address it. :)

Definitley a strange mechanic that was present in the OG Reach and something our internal Pro Team really honed in on during pre-release testing. Initial reports are positive, but we'd love to hear feedback from M+KB users on how this change feels.

Status is that it's in progress. It's unfortunately a complex issue that is, thankfully, on track to being resolved, but takes time. We know it's one of the biggest areas of frustration for players and the team is tackling as quickly as possible. We'll try and dig into more of the technical details and background after the break.

Incredible lol. BANSHEE ALWAYS WINS.

Great ref lol.

Nice!

thanks for flagging this.

Fantastic job, u/AyeiTzSteezy - these are super clean!

We don't truly have the capacity to investigate and act on every single report like this. HOWEVER - we know this is an issue, we are datamining and tracking this activity, and we know who these players are. The team is waiting on some services work/updates to occur behind the scenes (as quickly as possible) and then we will start addressing these players w/ bans/XP removal/unlock removal, etc.. (yes, the egregious offenders will likely lose the XP and unlocks they've acquired by cheating the system in addition to getting banned)

Not currently, no. We know there's some demand for splitscreen support on PC but it's currently out of scope. The team would like to look into this more down the road but it's unknown if it will be possible (5 more PC games to ship next year plus a growing list of fixes and improvements to be made for Reach).

Indeed. Just doing a little work with the services team to setup some tools and then it's banhammer time. These folks are likely losing the XP and unlocks they earned in addition to getting banned.